Don’t let the Hungarian prime minister’s globe-trotting and grandstanding fool you. Behind the posturing and attempts to steal the spotlight is a strongman who feels his position slipping.
By Sándor Ésik
August 2024
Viktor Orbán is living the dream. Since July 1 when he began his six-month stint as the President of the Council of the European Union, the Hungarian prime minister has sought center stage in capitals across the globe. Never mind that the position is largely ceremonial. Orbán is making the most of it, jet-setting unannounced from Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv to Vladimir Putin in Moscow, to an informal meeting with the Organization of Turkic States in Azerbaijan, to a rendezvous with Xi Jinping in Beijing, rounding it out with the NATO summit in Washington, D.C. (as well as meeting with former U.S. president Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago).
Orbán’s travel agenda isn’t aimless; he is intentionally seeking to agitate Brussels. His remarks on his global tour — calling for “peace talks” with Putin and claiming to be the only European leader that “can speak to everyone” — mirrored Kremlin rhetoric and outraged the rest of the EU. He snubbed German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock’s planned visit to Budapest for a last-minute meetup with Putin instead. Orbán incessantly vetoes unified statements from the EU and NATO. EU and NATO leaders punched back, stressing that Orbán’s brief presidency of the EU Council doesn’t give him negotiating authority in Moscow or Beijing. Members even boycotted summer meetings in Budapest as a rebuke.
Orbán is making bold maneuvers in the European Parliament (EP), too. His newly formed far-right political group, Patriots for Europe, recruited enough MPs to become formally recognized on July 6. Two days later, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) party joined the Patriots, making it the third-largest group in the EP.
At home, Orbán is hailed as a peacemaker and a powerful statesman — the only leader who engages in serious talks with both sides. EU leaders see through this grandstanding. They see a man “running around like a cat on meth,” who meets for a “peace mission” with Putin just 48 hours before the Russian air force intentionally strikes a children’s hospital in Kyiv, far from any military target or essential infrastructure.
What, then, is the point of Orbán’s globe-trotting, his parading as a powerful president of Europe, his instigating the EU and its allies while pretending to play to both sides? It’s not coming from a position of strength: A combination of personal ambitions, domestic political weaknesses, and severe economic troubles have backed Orbán into a corner where posturing is the only choice.
Orbán Puts Himself on a Pedestal
Orbán has always wished to be a powerful player in international politics. He sees himself as a distinctive type of politician: Instead of favoring careful, slow-paced diplomacy, he prides himself on being able to make quick and efficient deals. And now as president of the EU Council, he is finally able to run with the big dogs. He can mingle with influential figures in international politics. With Marine Le Pen’s RN as a member of the Patriots in the EP, his new group is potentially the most powerful of the far right.
He is also fulfilling Hungary’s dream. The country wants to be a player on the world stage. We are “the ferry between the East and the West,” as the Hungarian poet Endre Ady put it. Though he used “ferry country” as a pejorative, Hungarian politicians often see themselves as well-versed in the ways of the East and at home in the West. Hungarians want to believe Orbán and his entourage when they deride Western liberal democracy as obsolete and slow to respond to modern challenges, like migration. They firmly believe that the authoritarian, neoconservative approach trumpeted by Orbán is the right answer to those challenges. Embracing “illiberal democracy” has earned Orbán praise from his own country and among the international alt-right as well.
What’s Behind the Façade?
But Orbán’s political foundation is not as strong as it may seem. On first inspection, the European Parliament and local elections in June brought decent results for Orbán’s party, Fidesz. Although it lost two seats in the Parliament, it is still the strongest by a fair margin.
However, a serious challenger, Péter Magyar, emerged from within Orbán’s own party and managed to unite the opposition in just a few short months. It started with a political scandal that erupted in February, when Hungary’s president and justice minister pardoned a teacher implicated in a child sexual-abuse case. (The justice minister, Judit Varga, had been a top candidate for Orbán’s party in the EP.) Both Varga and the president, Katalin Novák, submitted their resignations at Orbán’s behest, but this failed to quell public outrage. People blamed Orbán; the two women were Orbán’s appointees to fill the female quota, and were essentially his puppets. Mass protests were organized overnight, and from the chaos emerged Magyar, a low-ranking member of Fidesz and Varga’s ex-husband, who initiated a movement against what he viewed as Orbán’s scapegoating and morally corrupt regime.
Magyar’s political party, Tisza, which stands for “Respect and Freedom,” was previously inactive but has now become the second-largest party in Hungary. It is a conservative, Christian, center-right party — not too different from Orbán’s own base. In EP elections, Tisza managed to secure almost 30 percent of the vote. While Fidesz and its allies still won more (44 percent), it was the party’s worst-ever result. Fidesz also lost some key towns, including the military garrison Szolnok, which the party had held since 2006; Paks, with its nuclear powerplant, that Fidesz had held for more than a decade; and Győr, one of the richest cities in Hungary. This feat for the opposition would have been unimaginable at any point in the last fourteen years of Orbán’s rule. Adding insult to injury, Tisza joined the largest group in the European Parliament, the conservative European People’s Party, that Fidesz had essentially been kicked out of in 2021.
Orbán expected a major far-right breakthrough in the EP elections. But in addition to deep rifts in his own country’s right wing, major rifts between the far-right parties of Europe hampered any gains they might have won. Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice (PiS) party and Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy (FdI) are firmly anti-Russian, while Hungary remains committed to “dialogue” with Putin. The Alternative for Germany (AfD), though it achieved its best result ever, rendered itself untouchable after scandals surfaced about Chinese and Russian spies in its ranks as well as neo-Nazi statements from its leaders. Overall, far-right parties gained seats and make up the most MPs in the EP, but their influence is split between three different groups: the European Conservatives and Reformists (comprised of FdI and PiS), Patriots for Europe (RN and Fidesz), and Europe of Sovereign Nations (a group newly formed by the ostracized AfD).
The landslide victory of Le Pen’s RN in the EP elections has been muted by its mediocre third-place finish in France’s snap parliamentary elections called by President Emmanuel Macron. Thus the influence of the RN and correspondingly Orbán’s Patriots group in the EP is severely limited.
Although Orbán has gained some prestige, he’s actually under far more political pressure than he lets on. His grandstanding is in part to obfuscate his political weaknesses.
Dire Economic Straits
Another reason dictating Orbán’s international blustering is the dire economic situation he has ushered in at home. Hungary has a long tradition of crony capitalism, adhering to the unwritten rule of 70/30: 70 percent of public-sector money went to companies loyal to the governing party, and 30 percent went to the opposition. Corrupt, but controlled. Orbán changed the game, demanding full loyalty from anyone who wanted to benefit — even if it was just a mile of country road that needed paving — and transformed a semi-corrupt system into total cronyism.
Hungary was economically stable for the first twelve or so years of Orbán’s rule, because of the billions in development funds coming from the EU and the lower interest rates that resulted from post-2008 monetary policies. But once the world recovered from the global financial crisis and once those EU development funds stopped flowing — or more accurately, were frozen to disincentivize Orbán’s corruption at home and obstructive stances in the EU — then the dam broke.
Orbán’s total cronyism gave the regime absolute control of every penny of taxpayer money. A feudal system emerged: The vassals were completely loyal, but they expected fiefs from their overlord. In other words, no matter how hard the EU pressured Orbán to reduce corruption, he simply could not. He must provide for his kingdom.
The government decided to implement austerity measures in April 2024 to combat the growing financial challenges. It increased the planned yearly deficit from 2.9 to 4.5 percent, and postponed billions of euros in state investments to meet the new target. However, these actions weren’t enough. On July 8, the government rolled out new taxes and increased existing ones, using special legislative powers introduced after the war in Ukraine began.
Orbán is in desperate need of money now, because the state has borrowed heavily from the people in recent years. Its “premium bonds” series offered a return of 1.5 percent over the previous year’s inflation rate. It was wildly popular and reached a peak in 2023, when inflation was 17.6 percent. The state now owes its people billions, with an interest rate of 19.1 percent. Meanwhile, industrial output has decreased as the automotive industry and the newly built Chinese battery factories (the two main drivers of Hungarian industrial output) struggled. Despite rising wages and inflation slowing to around 4 percent, consumption still stagnates. In desperate need of cash, Hungary took a billion-euro loan from China earlier this year.
Orbán cannot back off from state capture; his own entourage would dethrone him if he did. He cannot switch to softer rhetoric at home or with the EU and NATO; he has successfully convinced his own voters that the West is in decline and only anti-immigration, anti-LGBTQ warriors can save it. He cannot build a party bloc big enough to be a kingmaker in the European Parliament. But without these changes, he cannot hope that EU funds will start to flow again. Even if his “big friend in America” returns to the White House, the United States and its vast defense industry are committed to helping Ukraine. There is no easy solution.
The Show Must Go On
How can Orbán get out of the political and economic hole he’s dug for himself? The best he may be able to do is wait it out. With his fixed supermajority in the Hungarian Parliament, he can tweak election law in his favor. He has long proven to be a master of rigging the rules to his benefit. And with his unlimited access to taxpayer money, he can generate more propaganda. Elections have never been a threat to him. Péter Magyar might change that, but Orbán has always outmaneuvered his political opponents and will likely do so again.
He can also keep up the show. His vetoes, his posing with Putin and Xi, and his efforts to disrupt EU and NATO alliances are the actions of a man who has always wanted to be a power player, and now more than ever he may need to play the part. His own propaganda made his followers believe that he is one of them. More dangerously, Orbán himself might believe it, too. After all, he is living the dream.
The reality is that Orbán has wedged himself into a perilous position. Waking up from the dream is going to come as a shock, not just for him but for his entire country.
Sándor Ésik is an attorney practicing in Budapest, Hungary. He is also a blogger and an activist for democratic causes. His English blog about Hungary, the Hungarian Muse, is available on Substack.
Copyright © 2024 National Endowment for Democracy
Image credit: Rasid Necati Aslim/Anadolu via Getty Images
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